Word: powerlessness
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ACCESS. The most important achievement for the West was a Soviet guarantee of free and "unimpeded" travel along the three air corridors, two autobahns, three rail lines and two waterways that traverse the 110 miles between West Berlin and West Germany. The Soviets had long maintained that they were powerless to prevent East Germany from harassing traffic along the corridors; last week's agreement became possible only after the Russians consented to take specific responsibility for ensuring free access to West Berlin. The draft document specifies that passenger and freight trains, buses and trucks will be sealed before they...
...merely reminders of a rich heritage; they are also reassertions of dominance over the Catholics of the north and of vigilance against the Catholics of the south. Both of Northern Ireland's tribes are beset by a siege mentality: Ulster's approximately 500,000 Catholics feel politically powerless at the hands of its 1,000,000 Protestants; the Protestants in turn feel threatened by the 2,700,000 Catholics of the Irish Republic to the south...
...What should women do about lovers who treat them only as sexual objects? Kate Millett suggests that women are virtually powerless before such men-Lady Chatterley before Mellors, for example. In celebrating the "transformation of masculine ascendancy into a mystical religion," D.H. Lawrence presents "sexual politics in its most overpowering form," she wrote. Katherine Anne Porter, no feminist at all but a perceptive novelist, analyzed the situation quite differently. "It is plain," she wrote in an essay eleven years ago, "that Lady Chatterley will shortly be looking for another man; I give Mellors two years at the rate...
...traffic and organized crime; entertainers, hippies and adolescents could be given a bigger scapegoat role than they already have. But most solutions-like paying menial workers higher wages -would cause the affluent both fiscal and psychological pain. As a result, Gans concludes, poverty may disappear only "when the powerless can obtain enough power to change society...
...when the world goes wrong and we demand that someone pay for it, when Life Magazine needs a demon for our collective exorcism, we and Life look to the powerless (or occasionally to those that have fallen from power, reading that economic demise as testament to some moral failing). Denying one of the central facts of our social life, namely that the most chilling barbarities are fomented in committee, we isolate villains who cooperatively identify themselves by being members of the economic periphery in the first place (non-whites, "criminals," "drug addicts," the "insane," etc.). By assigning responsibility...